Tag: brand building

If you’re not getting introduced to a lot of your best clients’ best friends and colleagues, it’s because your marketing story is not worth talking about. It’s not remarkable.Being remarkable means two things.One, it means it’s cool, it’s neat.Two, it means it’s worth making a remark about.

If you or your service is worth making a remark about you are 99% of the way there.

However, we’ve talked with countless Financial Advisors and for the most part, their stories are the basically the same. They mention how their firm is different, where they went to school, the degrees they’ve earned, how great their numbers are, their charitable work, their families.

There is nothing about their story that clients and prospects feel is remarkable.

As soon as an Advisor moves away from their old marketing story to a new client centric story, everything changes. They’re qualified activity goes way up. So does revenue.

Because when you have a great marketing story, not only will your clients respond to you, they will also talk about you and your service to their friends.

Developing an effective story is a detailed process that shows you understand your market and their predominant worldview… distrust of Advisors and the Industry. (See Darth Vader Post) So, any form of puffery or selling razzle-dazzle will literally or figuratively slam the door.

An effective marketing story reveals your true authenticity. If your story is not authentic (and you don’t live your story every day), your clients and prospects will not be fooled.

Done well, it’s what will make your clients dedicated advocates, trumpeters who want to tell the world about your service. In their eyes it’s remarkable and so are you.

So, think about it. Have you completed a lot of warm, personally introduced meetings and first appointments with quality friends and colleagues of your best clients?

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And we believe it!

Today I’ll share a few quotes from Seth Godin’s book “All Marketers Are Liars”.

They will help you understand why you must reinforce what your target market already believes.

Godin writes that “worldview is the term I use to refer to the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation. A worldview is not who you are. It’s what you believe. It’s your biases”.

Here are several thought-provoking quotes from Godin’s book:

This on why stories should agree with your customer’s worldview:

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

This on why you shouldn’t try to change someone’s worldview (even if the facts and data reveal they are wrong):

Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy most smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of the worldview and you win.

This, on preconceived worldviews:

Worldviews are the reason that two intelligent people can look at the same data and walk away with completely different conclusions—it’s not that they didn’t have access to the data or that they have poor reasoning skill, it’s simply that they had already put themselves into a particular worldview before you even asked the question.

Finally and most importantly:

Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.

Remarkable always gets talked about. Marketing starts with having a service that is ‘better’ than the competition, giving clients what they really want, being remarkable and worthy of being discussed by your clients and potential clients.

1. Making promises and keeping them…
is a great way to build a brand. This is one of the ‘first and foremost’ branding lessons. Emphasis on making promises as well as keeping them is required.

2. Your best clients…
are worth far more than your average clients. It starts with knowing who your clients are, then knowing the best of the group.

3. Conversations among the members of your marketplace.
Conversations happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations, the ones that create the basis for your word of mouth marketing.

4. You’re viewing marketing as an expense.
Good marketers realize that marketing is an investment.

5. Clients don’t buy what they need.
They buy what they want. Gather as many insights as possible by observing what they do.

“A Simple Blueprint For A Successful Brand.” **

Brand building is the deliberate effort to create the desired perception in someone else’s mind.

It’s been said that “A Brand is not just a logo, a website, or your business cards… It’s an experience.”

To build a great brand you need the right blueprint for shaping perceptions about your service or your product.

The best blueprint begins with just three components: what, how and feeling.

Consider the example of Southwest airlines. What service do they provide? Well, it’s pretty simple: they move you from here to there.

That is Southwest’s what.

The what of a brand is typically straightforward. The most successful brands tend to represent only one what in their customers’ minds.

After what comes how.

Understanding the how of a brand begins with seeing that for every product or service, there can be many ways of delivering the what. “Overnight,” “cheaper,” “organic” – these are the types of words used to signal the specific how for which a business wants their product or services to be known.
For the most part, hows tend to travel into twos. One how is not quite enough, but more than two is unnecessary.

For Southwest Airlines, the first how is: “by air.”

Southwest began flying its first passengers on short hauls to and from second-tier airports in Texas where the competition was more likely a Greyhound than another airline.

There is a deep branding lesson. The customer is trying to accomplish a specific result – a specific what. The hows compete with one another. Nothing else does.

Southwest has a second how: “at a low price.”

Take away either of Southwest’s two distinct hows, or their performance aspects, and the brand – that is our perception of Southwest – starts to fall apart. Only Southwest is offering the entire package at once- the what and how that differentiate their brand in the minds of the customers.

What and how are the fundamentals of a sound brand blueprint, but the most successful brands include a third component: feeling.

Customers want to do business with people they like. Who doesn’t? Similarly, we prefer to consume products and services we feel good about. Southwest customers like the Southwest brand. The brand is fun and laid-back; it makes people feel good.

So, to summarize: brand building is the deliberate effort to create the desired perception in the mind of another person. The blueprint for creating the perception has three basic elements: what, how, and feeling.

**Edited from a post on Forbes.com by Jerry McLaughlin
*Quote from Jeff Bezos

Client Centric Marketing, a division of MB Marketing, Inc., teaches Advisors how to work with the qualified friends, family and colleagues of their most valuable clients, the clients they want to duplicate.